Correction: Ouma Shu Had the Worst Christmas

(This post is part of a series of posts covering Christmas-themed anime episodes. For more posts like these, check out the 12 Days of Anime tag.)

If I thought Kirito had a crap Christmas, Ouma Shu of Guilty Crown fame blows his suffering out of the water. The Lost Christmas in Guilty Crown involved Ouma Shu getting sexually harassed by his yandere older sister and a whole city of people dying in the apocalypse. Can’t get much worse than that!

Guilty Crown isn’t a terribly good show by any stretch of the imagination. Like Sword Art Online, it’s an anime that bloggers love to hate, but besides a string of really silly episodes (the Nazi Shu arc comes to mind), Guilty Crown was never anything other than middling. In fact, when I got around to rewatching episode 12 to write this post, I found I’d forgotten almost everything that happened in the story.

Episode 12 is dense with content to the point of incoherence, but it is a significant point in the Guilty Crown narrative for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s the climax of the first half of the story. It’s chock-a-block with dramatic reveals, including an extended flashback into Shu and Gai’s shared past. Secondly, it’s quite possibly the episode I stopped taking Guilty Crown seriously, even if I never thought of it as particularly good. Everything about Mana’s character is ridiculous, but she was the best part of the episode. Mana allowed me to embrace the inherent stupidity of this story’s setup.

From what I understand, Gai loves Mana for saving his life, while Mana wants to marry her brother because this is an anime. Okay, so far so good. I can understand this logic, at least.

Then Mana tricks Gai into shooting himself because… because… why the fuck not? After that, she puts on Gai’s blood as lipstick and assumes this will somehow get her into her brother’s pants. A winning plan, only foiled by Shu’s lack of sex drive.

Dr. Aggle sums it up:

It turns out that Lost Christmas happened and the world was nearly destroyed because Shuu wasn’t a siscon. It’s all his fault.

Let this lesson be learned.

Anyway, as Shu is angsting over the fact that everyone suddenly died (except for him, because he is shielded by plot armour), Gai appears out of nowhere with barely a wound on him even though he recently shot himself. Instead of trying to comfort Shu or suggest they work together to work out what the hell just happened, he just says, “I have to get stronger,” and disappears mysteriously, never to be seen again for years.

As you can see, it’s not the most well thought out of backstories. It’s hard to feel the tragedy when none of these characters make sense or are particularly likable. Mana does stand out for being batshit insane, though. Perhaps this is why the fact that millions of people died as a result of Mana’s raging libido amused me instead of saddened me.

Another thing I’m grateful to Guilty Crown and Lost Christmas for is that it introduced me to anime blogs. At the time I only knew three anime blogs: Star-Crossed Anime Blog, Shinmaru’s blog (which is a dead blog now) and Draggle’s blog. But I had a heap of fun listening to the Guilty Crown singalongs and voting for the dumbest moment every week. Thank you, Guilty Crown, for introducing me to the light!